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Weather History of New England – Six Storms that Changed Our World

Weather history often shapes our lives in ways we can’t imagine. But for storms of 1746, the French, under leadership of Duc D’Anville, might well have bombarded New England into submission. Would our state names sound better in French? We’ll never know.
But weather history does offer us some more concrete examples of how storms put their imprint on life as we know it today. Severe and bizarre weather events inspire gripping tales of courage and tragedy, destruction and rebirth, the marvelous and the mundane. But when the storm or flood or drought is over, we hear little more about them. But that doesn’t mean they stop affecting us, they’ve just faded into the background.

But weather history has actually affected the course of New England history as much as any war or election. We just don’t often see it or realize it.

The Year Without a Summer, for example, inspired religious revivalism and westward migration.

Boston and New York might look different today were it not for the Great Snow Hurricane of 1888.

Vermont’s landscape was changed forever by the flood of 1927. New maps of New England had to be drawn after the hurricane of 1938. Both storms changed the political landscape as well.

A terrible drought in 1947 produced 200 wildfires in Maine in just 20 days, forcing reform and centralization of the state’s firefighting abilities.

Weather history forced a complete reorganization of the weather service following the sudden, deadly Worcester tornado of 1953.

Here, then, are six tales of severe events in New England weather history that changed the region. Download them here.

Included in this report you’ll find all out about:.

1816, The Year Without a Summer – and why your ancestors might have changed faith because of it.
The Great White Hurricane of 1888 – and how it changed your commute to work.
The Vermont Flood of 1927 – and how it created the modern leaf-peeping craze.
Great New England Hurricane of 1938 – the event that touched every facet of life in New England.
The Drought Year When Maine Burned – and how it created the modern firefighter.
The Killer Worcester Tornado of 1953 – and how it gave birth to modern weather forecasting.

As you’ll discover, each of these events not only dramatically impacted New England when they happened, they still are shaping your world in ways you see today. They are six chapters in the weather history of New England that changed the world around us in amazing ways. Download the Weather History of New England today.

This report is for members of the New England Historical Society, so you’ll need to sign in to access it. If you’re not a member, isn’t it time you were? Why not register today? It’s free. Already a member? Download it now!

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The Hidden Treasures of Newport Cabinetmaker John Goddard

Leigh Keno could hardly contain himself on Antique Roadshow in 2015 when a Wisconsin woman brought in a tea table purchased at an estate sale for $100 in 1957. The excitable furniture expert praised “the wonderful wood and great mahogany,” the “wonderful claw ball foot” and the “incised grooves along the edge of the cleat.” “I feel that this may be by the famous craftsman, a real master craftsman, John Goddard of Newport,” he said.

Though a puppy had chewed one of the claw feet, Keno told the owner the table would sell upwards of $14,000 to $15,000. “Wait ’til my siblings hear this,” she said.

Side chair, Newport, R.I., possibly John Goddard. From the Chazen Museum of Art.

Several years later, Leigh Keno and his brother Leslie found a John Goddard tea table at a Vermont horse-breeding farm. The owners had suffered a devastating fire and didn’t know how they’d pay the electric bill. Sale of the tea table saved the ranch.

The Kenos knew the market for Goddard furniture. In 1990, a mahogany desk made by John Goddard sold at auction for $11 million plus a 10 percent commission. Until then, no other piece of furniture had sold for anything near that price. It cost four times as much as a Louis XVI table that belonged to Marie Antoinette.

A John Goddard table, courtesy National Gallery of Art

John Goddard

Goddard made the $12 million block-and-shell desk for Nicholas Brown, a Providence merchant and member of the prominent Brown family. During the 18^th century, the simple but elegant Newport furniture made by the Goddard and Townsend families was a status symbol. Then it fell into obscurity until 20^th century scholars woke up to the glories of Newport furniture.

Goddard may have ranked as the best of the Rhode Island craftsmen. He was called the Vincent van Gogh of mahogany. But when he died in 1785, he left his 16 children nothing – nothing but the ability to make fine furniture.

He was born in Dartmouth, Mass., on Jan. 20, 1724, the son of a successful shipwright, Daniel Goddard, and his wife Mary Tripp. Both were Quakers. Soon after John’s birth, his family moved to Newport, where his father built ships that would carry his son’s furniture.

The wealthy seaport of Newport, then the fifth-largest city in America, had a thriving cabinetmaking industry. Newport furniture evolved differently from that of Boston and Philadelphia. It had less of an English influence, and was characterized by fine workmanship, block fronts, curved shells, bold ball-and-claw feet, spare ornamentation and elegant proportions.

High chest attributed to John Townsend, courtesy National Gallery of Art

Goddard and Townsend

Young Goddard was apprenticed to Job Townsend, a cabinetmaker. He then became a freeman in 1745 at age 21 and married Hannah Townsend, Job’s daughter. His brother James married Hannah’s sister. All in all, three generations of Townsends and Goddards intermarried and produced 20 cabinetmakers and some of the best furniture in America.

John Goddard was talented and ambitious, and he wanted to outdo the Townsends. He had 16 children, three more than his former master Job. He also built a house and shop bigger than Job’s.

The Goddard house in Newport

Historians speculate he went out on his own to pursue the higher end of the business. He developed his own style in furniture, described as “a bold and muscular version of the delicate, linear cabriole style associated with his master and the prior generation.”

Neatest Workman in America

His big break was a commission for the newly married John Brown. Goddard made a scalloped tea table, two corner chairs, two clawfoot tables, one tea table and a dressing table. (It now belongs to the John Brown House Museum.)

Pier table, John Goddard, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Brown’s brothers Nicholas and Moses simply had to have Goddard’s furniture. Goddard didn’t get Moses his furniture fast enough, and Moses wrote him an angry note.

This you was to do, that is, Finish ye Work I wrote for ye first you did after my Brother’s Wife’s furniture were done.

The high point of John Goddard’s career came in the 1760s and early 1770s. He added to his clients Aaron Lopez, Jabez Bowen, Christopher Champlin, James Atkinson and Stephen Hopkins. His reputation spread to wealthy clients in England and the West Indies, commissioned by John Banister.

He may not have had a good head for business. He often delivered his work late, and he had a hard time keeping his workers occupied.

Nicholas Brown made excuses for Goddard when he wrote to a West Indian client who had ordered a set of armchairs. “The Two Armed Chaiar is not Done, we have it now making by the neatest workman in America, was in hoops to have it finished by this, but the Maker being Very Curious in Mahy. The Feet in Imitation of Eagles Claws & all the other parts in the Handsomest manner is the Reason of its not being Done.”

In 1764, Goddard won election to two public offices: viewer of joiners’ lumber and justice of the peace.

British Invasion

Then in 1776, the British occupied Newport. Nearly half the town left, and the population fell to 5,299 from 9,209 in 1770. The occupation devastated Newport’s commerce, and it did not spare Goddard.

A French squadron arrives to kick the British out of Newport.

He fell on hard times and had to make ready-made furniture to survive.

He may have lost business because of rumors he had Loyalist sympathies. Three of his sons moved to Nova Scotia after the British left. But three others continued the cabinetmaking business in Newport.

Colonial and John Goddard Revival

John Goddard died broke and unknown on July 9, 1785. Decades later, the Colonial Revival – and furniture scholarship – revived his reputation and that of Newport furniture.

Luke Vincent Lockwood, the pioneering furniture scholar in the United States, brought back interest in Newport furniture in 1901 with his book, Colonial Furniture in America. Antiques magazine, which began publication in 1922 furthered interest in fine Newport cabinetry.

The Rhode Island School of Design in 1927 put on the first special exhibition of Rhode Island furniture, which included an essay on John Goddard’s life. The same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought three Newport pieces.

As scholarship continued to identify more Newport furniture, its reputation soared. It reached its zenith in 1990 when a descendant of Nicholas Brown sold Goddard’s block-and-shell desk at auction.

Newport block-and-shell furniture still commands high prices at auction houses.

This story updated in 2023. Image of the Goddard house By The original uploader Swampyank at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Kurpfalzbilder.de using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5872189.

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New England Coffee Houses: From Fad to Revolution to Fraud

Coffee probably first arrived in New England in 1614 when John Smith sailed up the coast on an exploratory voyage. New England coffee houses took a bit longer to arrive.

The coffee bean, first cultivated in Ethiopia, started out as primarily a drink of the Muslim world. The intrepid Smith encountered it during his time in Turkey and helped spread the word. The drink gained popularity across Europe in the early 1600s. By 1652 the brew had moved out of the kitchens of England, where beans were mashed with mortar and pestle, and into coffee houses. Over the next 20 years, they would number more than 3,000 in England.

First New England Coffee House

In America, Dorothy Jones, who immigrated to Boston from Wales, needed a way to make a living. There is no record of coffee coming over to New England on the Mayflower, but the ship did bring a mortar and pestle that would have been used to make coffee powder.

Painting of an early London coffee house.

Coffee was one of many of the drinks a patron at an early colonial tavern could purchase, along with wines, ciders, and chocolate. But colonists eagerly adopted the popular trends of their home country, and England was mad for coffee houses.

So in 1670, Jones received a license from the government announcing her new venture: “Mrs. Dorothy Jones, the wife of Mr. Morgan Jones, is approved of to keepe a house of publique Entertainment for the selling of Coffee & Chochaletto.”

Morgan Jones, Dorothy’s husband, was a minister and school teacher who moved about from one colony to another, leaving Dorothy to raise funds for her own needs. She capitalized on the coffee trend in Europe, which had already arrived in New York. Four years later, she would add wine and cider to her menu.

From Dorothy’s experiment grew coffee houses throughout New England, though they were difficult to distinguish from taverns in their offerings. Back in the mother country, coffee houses became hotbeds of political discussion. Patrons were admitted for a penny, received unlimited refills and were immersed in the news of the world shared by the assembled public there.

Coffee House Politicians

Wary of the revolutionary ideas brewing in the coffee houses and spouted by the “coffee house politicians,” Charles II tried in vain to squash them out of existence. In the colonies, meanwhile, the coffeehouses (which sold as much alcohol as coffee) also became political.

The British Coffee House, which dated to the 1690s, became the scene of one of New England’s more well-known fights in the run-up to the revolutionary war. The Green Dragon tavern was the hangout of the agitators who opposed British colonial policy, such as lawyer James Otis. Loyalists hung out in the British Coffee House.

James Otis by Henry Blackburn

In 1769, the Loyalists lured Otis to the British Coffee House, and he got whacked on the head with a cane for his views. Otis was never the same man after. Sensing the winds of change, however, the British eventually changed its name, rebranding itself the “American Coffee House.”

Exchange Coffee House

Over the years coffee houses came in all flavors, from the grandest to the lowest. Probably the largest, most expensive coffee house ever built, however, was also in Boston. The Exchange Coffee House was the brain child of Andrew Dexter, Jr. At seven stories tall, it counted as a skyscraper in the early 19th century.

Dexter envisioned a palace of commerce. Some would come to drink. Others would come to trade information about shipping and foreign conditions. And, most importantly, Dexter wanted to establish a trading floor for bank notes.

The Exchange Coffee House

Unfortunately, Dexter was a fraud. In 1808, currency was issued by individual banks, based upon the gold and silver they held. People traded and valued bank notes based upon a bank’s reputation for solvency. A trader might make a sharp profit buying a discounted note and redeeming it for its full value in gold or silver.

Running short of funds, Dexter came up with a scheme for financing his vision. He began taking over banks in remote parts of New England and issuing bank notes far in excess of their assets. He thought no one would ever redeem the notes and he could have unlimited capital.

In 1807, Thomas Jefferson placed an embargo on British goods, throwing New England into a depression. As a result, holders of some of Dexter’s notes tried to exchange them for their face value in gold or silver. Lacking funds, bank after bank collapsed. As news of Dexter’s scheme spread, his bank notes became worthless.

Dexter fled to Canada and his coffee house became a white elephant for its new owners. It limped on as a banquet hall and coffee house, but burned in 1818.

Thanks to: All About Coffee By William H. Ukers. This story last updated in 2022.

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Judith Sargent Murray, the Forgotten Revolutionary

In 1984, 20 volumes of 5,000 letters by an 18^th-century feminist were discovered in Natchez, Miss. Judith Sargent Murray wrote them, having copied all her correspondence starting at the age of 23. Historians are still trying to digest them all.

Judith Sargent Murray by John Singleton Copley

Judith Sargent Murray was born into a well-to-do family on May 1, 1751 in Gloucester, Mass. Though smart and curious, her family followed the custom of the day and limited her education because of her sex.

Her lack of educational opportunity troubled her. So she taught herself history and French, and began writing essays under masculine pen names. She advocated women’s equality, education and economic independence while spreading the word about Universalism.

On Nov. 3, 1774, John Murray walked into Winthrop Sargent’s parlor in Gloucester to talk to him about Universalism. The new denomination was just beginning to erode the stern Congregationalism that dominated New England. Murray was a charismatic 33-year-old preacher who had arrived in New Jersey colony only four years earlier, just after his wife and only child had died.

Becoming Judith Sargent Murray

That November day, Murray met Sargent’s 23-year-old daughter Judith. They undoubtedly talked about Universalism, and they were probably attracted to each other. She was smart, beautiful and devoted to Universalism. She was also married.

Nevertheless, Judith hoped they could “surely, and with the strictest propriety, mingle souls upon paper” by writing letters to each other.

They were friends for 14 years and married for 27. Over the course of their friendship and marriage, Judith became the most important female essayist in America and John became the founder of American Universalism.

Five years before that meeting with John Murray, 18-year-old Judith Sargent married John Stevens, a Gloucester sea captain and merchant. She did not love him, but she respected him and tried her best to do her duty by him.

They lived in the largest and most elegant house in Gloucester, but she felt lonely as he often went away to sea.

Corroding Sorrows

She was philosophical about her first marriage as she was about many things: “Self approbation ensures peace, while discord at home is pregnant with most corroding sorrows,” she wrote.

She published some poems. In 1794 Town and Country magazine would print her first essay, which argued for more advanced education for girls. She believed lack of education led to low self-esteem in girls. “I think, to teach young minds to aspire, ought to be the ground work of education,” she wrote.

She and John Stevens did not have children, but they did take in and educate two orphans. His fortunes fell while her writing career blossomed. The American Revolution hurt the maritime industry, his father’s business failed and John mismanaged his own business. In 1786, John fled Gloucester to avoid debtors’ prison and died soon after in St. Eustatius in the West Indies.

She kept up her writing, including her letters to John Murray.

Universalism in Gloucester

John Murray

Universalists differed from the New England Congregationalists, or Puritans, who believed the ‘elect’ were saved and the ‘unregenerate’ weren’t. Universalists believed in universal salvation and religious liberty.

Universalism started during the Reformation in England. It was John Murray who brought it to America. He started preaching in Lacey Township, N.J., and continued in his travels from New Hampshire to Virginia.

The Sargents converted to Universalism as soon as it came to America, as did John Stevens. Gloucester was the only placee in the country where John Murray found people had already converted to Universalism.

The Congregationalists suspended the Sargents from the First Parish Church of Gloucester. Then they invited the Murrays to return, but the Murrays refused. Instead, they went to court and won their case, allowing them to support the church they preferred. They also built the first Universalist meeting house on land donated by Winthrop Sargent and dedicated on Christmas Day 1780.

Hell? No

During the Revolution, John Murray was suspected of being a British spy, but George Washington appointed him chaplain of the Rhode Island Brigade. The other chaplains objected to him because he didn’t believe in hell.

John Murray and Judith Sargent Stevens married on Oct. 6, 1788. It was a love match, a passionate marriage in which both were equal.

She went with him as he preached in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Along the way they met people like Abigail and John Adams, Martha Washington and Benjamin Franklin’s family.

She proselytized on behalf of Universalism as the religion compatible with the ideals of the American Revolution: human liberty and empowerment. Universalism was the first American denomination to ordain women

The Murrays had a son who lived only a few hours. Then at 40, Judith gave birth to her only daughter, Julia, who lived to be 31.

The Gleaner

Judith’s feminist essays had proved popular, and in 1792 she began to write columns for the Massachusetts Magazine as a man She used the nom de plume ‘The Gleaner.’

In 1793 the Murrays moved to Boston, where John served as pastor of the Universalist Society of Boston.

The town had just lifted its ban on the theater, which Judith Sargent Murray strongly supported. She wrote a play, The Medium, probably the first to be produced by an American on stage. Her groundbreaking essay, On the Equality of Women, predated Mary Shelley’s plea for equality of the sexes by two years.

By 1798, the Murrays needed money, and Judith published The Gleaner’s essays and plays in a three-volume set. George Washington, John Adams, Henry Knox and Mercy Otis Warren bought copies.

Her commitment to education for women did not waver. In 1802 she helped her cousin, Judith Saunders, and Clementine Beach open a school for girls in the nearby town of Dorchester.

Sargent House Museum

Final Days

John Murray suffered a stroke in 1809 and Judith spent the next six years caring for him. Their daughter married a wealthy Harvard student, Adam Louis Bingamon, in 1812. After John Murray died in 1815 Judith completed his autobiography and moved to Natchez, Miss., to be with her daughter.

She died in Natchez on June 9, 1820, at the age of 69 and is buried on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Julia died two years later.

Her home in Gloucester is now a museum where visitors can view paintings by one of her relatives, John Singer Sargent.

With thanks to Mingling Souls Upon Paper: An 18^th Century Love Story by Bonnie Hurd Smith.

Image of Sargent House Museum By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/8394001021/in/photostream, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24003568.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Maine’s Duchess of Dix Island and The Rise and Fall of The Great Granite Ring

The story of the Duchess of Dix Island begins with a bad investment. In 1839 Horace Beals became a partner in the Franklin Granite Company, with quarries in Quincy, Mass., and New York.

After just 18 months, the firm floundered, leaving Beals with nothing.

Granite Quarrying in New Hampshire

It wasn’t the only time he would fail, but he was a determined man. Beals would later accept a piece of land in Maine – the 55-acre Dix Island and some smaller neighboring islands – as payment for a debt. That decision would make him a millionaire many times over.

At first glance, Beals wasn’t in love with Dix Island. If someone were looking for a good place to commit suicide, he concluded, Dix with its high granite peaks would be a fine choice.

Over the next 50 years, the tiny Dix Island’s population would explode and contract, topple a political dynasty and give rise to a Spanish duchess before finally slipping into the hands of her flamboyant American gigolo and returning to obscurity.

Dix Island

Dix Island is about three miles off the coast of Rockland, Maine. Today it’s home to a handful of summer houses. While private, its owners welcome polite visits from day tripping boaters. When Beals acquired it, along with several neighboring islands, Dix was a tiny, potential granite quarry. But it also put Beals at the nexus of an unusually ambitious and corrupt group of politicians and businessmen.

Beals was the operations man at Dix Island. Others provided political and financial clout. Courtland P. Dixon was essential to Dix’s first big job – providing granite for the Charleston customs house in far-off South Carolina.

Dixon was son of a Rhode Island senator and brother to a New York congressman. He lived in the South and had a strong network among the politicians there. So it was no surprise the final design of the customs house in South Carolina included Maine granite in its specifications. In those times, senators got to sign off on the details of federal construction jobs in their states.

The work at the quarry slowed during the Civil War, but Beals and Dixon were perfecting their operation. They would join together with three others and form what would become known as the Granite Ring – a scandalous business association that rigged public construction contracts for decades.

The Granite Ring

The ring consisted of General Davis Tilson’s Hurricane Island Granite Company; Mark St. John of Clark Island Company, J.R. Bodwell of the Bodwell Granite Company of Vinalhaven and Dixon’s Dix Island Granite Company. Bodwell would go on to become a governor of Maine, but for the most part these men relied on (bribed) two of Maine’s notoriously corrupt Republican leaders, senators James Blaine and Eugene Hale, to handle the politics.

The team worked a multi-pronged approach. Get the federal architects to specify granite for major new buildings and then get their congressmen to deliver them the contracts for their quarries. By working together they could rig the bids and direct the work where they wanted, setting prices as they pleased.

James Blaine, “The Continental Liar from the State of Maine”

15 Percenters

To make the deal even more lucrative, the quarry contracts were known as “15 percent contracts.” The quarry owners would supply finished granite and charge the entire cost of mining and finishing it plus 15 percent. This obviously provided every incentive to produce the granite as expensively as possible.

Over time, other states demanded to get in on the action, but with federal construction projects exploding after the Civil War there was plenty of money to spread around. Congress decided that town after town, no matter how small, needed a post office, customs house or other federal building. In an interview about the Granite Ring scandal after it had erupted the Treasury Department’s chief architect, Alfred Bult Mullett, would explain the way the ring worked:

“This new contracting for the public buildings is a steal clean through. The quarry men put it up and paid Ben Butler $50,000 to get it done.”

“Tell me, Mr. Mullet,” I said, “all about that quarry job, and who were in it?”

“It was a Maine job,” said Mullett, “engineered by that little villain Eugene Hale. Originally they designed to let in only Maine quarries, but Condit Smith, General Sherman’s old quartermaster you know, Big Smith, he found they were going to count out his quarry, the Westham (Richmond, Virginia,) quarry, and he burst it open. They had to let him in and Jonas French, Ben Butler’s quarryman of Cape Ann. The Bodwell granite company is in it on behalf of the Cincinnati post office. They own the Fox Island quarries. Then the Hurricane Island and the Dix Island quarries join in, too.

“That granite ring is an offshoot to the lime kiln ring that governs Maine politics. These fellows sold me out.”

Dix Island Stonecutters

With the politics in place, the only problem the quarries had was finding enough labor to deliver the enormous edifices on time. Dix Island and the other Maine quarries advertised internationally. Soon they attracted interest from Scotland and Ireland. The first men to arrive were well-paid and well-treated. The word spread rapidly, and soon stonecutters from Europe were flooding into Maine by the hundreds.

U.S. Treasury

At its peak, more than 1,400 men lived and worked on tiny Dix Island, mining and finishing the huge blocks of granite for federal projects (some estimates put the number as high as 2,000). The U.S. Treasury building in Washington, D.C., the New York City Post Office and Philadelphia Post Offices were built largely of Dix Island Granite. And countless smaller projects were made of the stone.

The more skilled workers were put to work carving eagles and other decorative architectural elements while the unskilled workers were polishing and finishing stones. Or they were pulling the blocks from the quarry with the 52 oxen that called the island home.

More than a thousand workers lived in island boarding houses and hotels. The Dix Island Hotel had 250 rooms, The Aberdeen, 200, and largest of all, The Shamrock, had 350 rooms. In addition to the workers, the hotels played host to congressmen and businessmen when they had to visit.

Boats made their way daily out from Thomaston and Rockland carrying even more workers – ferries and small rowboats alike making their way out in the dark morning hours and back home in afternoon. On one side of the island a steady stream of schooners arrived to carry the granite south to the cities. The island was outfitted with a school for the children of the workers and a church. Forges were needed to sharpen tools and stores to supply necessities.

Eugene Hale

Shocker

There was a seemingly limitless demand for labor. More workers meant more money for the Granite Ring. The monthly payroll at Dix Island alone topped $100,000. A lot of that money found its way back to Ireland and Scotland, but plenty stayed local. In addition to driving prices for land and goods, it fueled illegal liquor sales and a gambling house in Rockland.

For the quarry ring, it was a thing of beauty. For every dollar they paid out, the government paid them $1.15. Even a Wall Street banker couldn’t imagine such a fantasy.

The good times couldn’t last forever, however, and they didn’t. By 1870 decline was setting in. With the sweetheart deals under scrutiny, the quarrymen tried to squeeze the workers. Though outright strikes were rare, the workers were angry about the company stores they were forced to buy from and the health effects of inhaling years of granite dust were becoming apparent.

The election of 1878 focused everyone’s attention on Maine when the unthinkable happened. A stonecutter who worked on Dix, Thompson Murch, ran against and defeated Congressman Eugene Hale. Both Republican and Democratic newspapers were shocked that a labor rabble rouser could win in Maine. And even though the legislature responded by installing Hale in the U.S. Senate, the election marked a turning point as the granite ring began crumbling.

The Duchess of Dix Island

Beals never saw his Dix Island quarry reach its greatest heights or its decline. He died in 1864 when the quarry was profitable but not yet enormous. His wife would be the beneficiary of his good fortune and hard work.

Jane Cornwall married Horace Beals in New York. He was 14 years older than she, and together they had four children. While Horace lived on Dix Island, he hired architects and gardeners and gave them carte blanche to build a mansion. He populated the estate with servants to try to make the island life more appealing for her.

Beals’ other major investment was a hotel in Chelsea, Maine. He bought it hoping it would become a desirable tourist attraction like the Poland Spring House or Saratoga Springs. While he enjoyed it as a retreat when he was ill, the property was never a commercial success. The U.S. government would once again bail Beals out, buying his property for a soldiers home – the first in the nation. The government then turned it into the Togus Springs VA Hospital.

Jane Beals never developed the affection for Dix Island that Horace hoped for. When he died she left the island, leaving the property with all its ornate fixtures to spoil. It would serve as a barn for sheep before finally yielding to time.

Free of the island, Jane Beals remarried, and remarried and remarried. She first married a doctor and then became a Spanish duchess when she married the Duke della Castellucia. That made her Jane Tamajo, Duchess of Castellucia.

One Last Gasp for the Duchess

There was one last gasp of adventure ahead for Jane. In 1893 the duke died. Splitting her time between Florida and New York, she would encounter her final husband: Edward Leonard Dwyer. Jane was 70 and by all accounts a shrewd woman. Dwyer was 43, an unapologetic adventurer with an astounding life story of his own.

In the six months of their marriage in 1895, Edward would manage to extract $350,000 from Jane. The duchess also gave her new boy-toy the small group of islands off the coast of Maine, now largely uninhabited and stripped of much of their granite.

In her last years before her death in 1895, Jane made five wills, each revision adding in children and grandchildren or disinheriting them as her moods swung. In the end, her family divided up more than $7 million and generated more than 1,200 pages of legal filings feuding amongst themselves.

For husband number four, just $10 was his final inheritance. He sold Dix Island, and the other islands, for $135,000 to raise a stake for his final adventures .The quarries slowly wound up business.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of U.S. Treasury building By Florian Hirzinger – www.fh-ap.com – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12996008.

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Revolutionary African-Americans Who Fought for Freedom

When Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Boston in the fall of 1951, the word “‘freedom” was very much in the air. The Freedom Trail had just been created, an instant and enduring success. Tourists flocked to the path that marked steps taken by such Revolutionary heroes as Paul Revere, Sam Adams and John Hancock.

Plenty of other heroes who fought for freedom and dignity during the Revolutionary era. The New England Historical Society presents six stories about African-Americans who struggled for liberty.

African Americans Seeking Freedom

Black Kings and Governors of Early New England: For a century beginning in 1750, New England African-Americans elected 31 of their own black kings and governors. These early leaders presided over an informal social order, It prepared African-Americans for their role as free civic participants.

Crispus Attucks, a seafaring African-American, led a crowd of mostly white sailors into danger and history by inciting the Boston Massacre.

In New England, African-Americans fought and suffered and died in the American Revolution. As many as one-quarter of the men who served in the war were African-American. Tobias Gilmore won his freedom by fighting in the American Revolution. In his hometown of Raynham, Mass., on every July 4th he fired a cannon 14 times. He fired 13 for each of the original colonies and then one for George Washington.

Elizabeth Freeman couldn’t read but she knew what freedom meant. So she took her case to court in Massachusetts. “If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it,” she said.

Ona Judge Staines outwitted her slavemaster – George Washington. She escaped to freedom in Portsmouth, N.H., and then eluded his attempts to get her back.

Paul Cuffe, a Quaker who lived in Westport, R.I., was the wealthiest African American in the country. He was taken prisoner during the American Revolution, Afterwards he decided the best hope for his people was to return to Africa.

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